Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was hospitalized Sunday with a blood clot, which is related to the concussion she suffered recently while recovering from the flu, according to a State Department spokesman.

Let's hope for a quick and full recovery. Because not only is recovery here possible it is highly likely.
Recovery not so likely, here:

Boehner continued: "Republicans made every effort to reach the ‘balanced’ deficit agreement that the president promised the American people, while the president has continued to insist on a package skewed dramatically in favor of higher taxes that would destroy jobs. We’ve been reasonable and responsible.

A 31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with
second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a
man who was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in
Queens and crushed by an oncoming train.

The woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him
to be a Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district
attorney, said.

“The defendant is accused of committing what is every subway commuter’s
nightmare: Being suddenly and senselessly pushed into the path of an
oncoming train,” Mr. Brown said in an interview.

In a statement,
Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told
the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate
Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers
I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu
faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack,
officials said.

The victim, Sunando Sen, was born in India and, according to a roommate, was raised Hindu.

What can you really say -- morally reprehensible and really really extra stupid?

I'm going to go on out on not too much of a limb and say I bet I know Ms. Menendez's viewing preferences.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

I'd like to remind Hobby Lobby that as I am a liberal they should know that my favorite hobbies are recreational sex and performing non-abortions.

Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby will defy a federal law that requires
employee health care plans to provide insurance coverage for types of
contraception that the firm’s owners consider to be “abortion-causing
drugs and devices,” an attorney for the company said Thursday.

Advertisement

With Wednesday’s rejection of an emergency stay of that
federal health care law by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Hobby
Lobby and sister company Mardel could be subject to fines of up to $1.3
million a day beginning Tuesday.

Of course, what they are resisting is contraceptives and the morning-after pill which doesn't cause abortions.

With no health insurance and not enough money for a doctor, Laura Johnson is long accustomed to treating her ailments with a self-written prescription: home remedies, prayer and denial...

After she collapsed last year and landed in in a local emergency room, doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure and hypothyroid. They ordered her not to work. She arranged a Social Security disability benefit, and she enrolled in Medicaid, the government-furnished insurance program for the poor. She used her Medicaid card to secure needed prescription medications. Her ailments stabilized.
But this year, the state determined that the $819 a month she draws in disability payments exceed the allowable limit. By the federal government's reckoning, her $9,800 annual income made her officially poor. But under the standards set by Louisiana, she was too well off to receive Medicaid.
T

his is how Johnson, 57, finds herself back amid the roughly 49 million Americans who lack health insurance.

All because Louisiana's asshole Governor -- like so many Republicans -- cannot go along with any measure that is associated with Bar-lack Obama.

...the number of American airstrikes in Yemen, largely carried out by unmanned drones, has surged over the past year, as much as tripling in frequency in comparison with 2011.

And in between our nations mourning over victims of mass shootings...

A botched drone strike in the central town of Rada left 12 civilians dead this fall, inflaming widespread apprehensions about the strikes.
“They’re having a huge effect in how people see the U.S.,” said Intisar al Qadhi, a political activist who’s the daughter of a prominent tribal leader from the province of Mareb, the site of numerous drone strikes. “When we think about America, we see an image of a plane, dropping bombs on our people.”

U.S. Sen. Michael Crapo, a nominally sober and "squeaky clean"
Mormon busted for a DUI on Sunday, is apparently no shrinking violet
when it comes to hitting the sauce. According to a police report unearthed by the Washington Post,
the Republican senator from Idaho told his arresting officer he'd
"consumed several shots of vodka" before setting off in his car and
making a left turn on a red light. Crapo "said he drank the vodka hours
earlier, and hadn’t had anything to drink since," but he still blew a
blood alcohol level of 0.11.

It's not exactly the biggest scandal ever -- this makes him about the oh...millionth politician to have a DUI (may be conservative in guessing there) -- but the fact he claims to not drink adds a bit to it.

Yesterday morning I wrote of the most important story ever...in the mind of no one...the effort of gun nuts to deport British ex-patriot and generally loathsome person Piers Morgan back to the United Kingdom.

But the Brits are not going to just sit there and take this Yankee rebellion...this time.

A group of them have gotten together and put together a petition to call "John Bullshit!" on the efforts to send Piers Morgan back to the UK.

The petition is worded less passionately than the one calling for the Briton's deportation, reading: "We want to keep Piers Morgan in the USA. There are two very good reasons for this. Firstly, the first amendment. Second and the more important point. No one in the UK wants him back. Actually there is a third. It will be hilarious to see how loads of angry Americans react."

So in summary, it is a matter of principle and this once, Piers Morgan is right.

But second, and most importantly, Piers Morgan is not in Great Britain and THAT'S the way they like it...in Great Britain.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its
final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization,
went into free fall.

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority
leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife,
Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to
seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding
assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises,
while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million
— and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their
return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who
has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential
conservative grass-roots organizations.

Stephenson, the founder
of the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America and a director on
the FreedomWorks board, agreed to commit $400,000 per year over 20 years
in exchange for Armey’s agreement to leave the group.

Of course, all these assholes are total Gun nuts...and the price of weilding a weapon IN THE FUCKING WORKPLACE if you are a high-ranking Republican is $8 million dollars. BTW, as the story points out this was only a couple weeks after a shooting at the Family Research Council offices -- a group that worked closely with Freedom Works.

So a guy was then allowed to just stroll in packing heat.

Good security.

But by all means, these folks should totally be allowed to govern.
...of course, if only another Freedom Works idiot was armed with a gun Dick Armey could never have held them for $8 million in ransom money that was obtained days after the incident.

There are times when doing the right thing is costly and makes one uncomfortable...queasy even.

A petition to deport CNN host Piers Morgan over his heated comments on gun control has reached more than 62,000 signatures in just 4 days, far exceeding the threshold required for a White House response. A petition must get 25,000 signatures in 30 days in order to elicit a response.

Look I'd like to see Piers Morgan leave my resident hemisphere as much as the next person so he can engage in all manner of unethical journalistic conduct against individuals or write ill-conceived rants about the management of Arsenal F.C. without me knowing of it. I really do hate coming to his defense when he's right.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

But Ms. O’Sullivan again took umbrage. As everyone went silent, she recalled a conference she attended in Australia in which a liberal nun (who “didn’t even have the decency to wear a habit”) criticized America for its “inner-city racism.”

Offended, Ms. O’Sullivan recounted what she wished she’d said to this nun:
“Pardon me, madam, but I have been in your country of Australia for ten days and the only Aborigines I’ve seen have been drunk on the street, and at least if we were in my country they would be serving the drinks at this conference!”

Ms. O’Sullivan then warned against watering down the purity of the conservative agenda to placate minorities or, as she put it, rather succinctly, “the bastardization of the product.”

On Sunday morning, Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, told the world that armed guards stopped school shootings in Israel. Israel begs to differ.
...

But according to Yigal Palmor, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, it's not. More specifically, the two situations are "fundamentally different," and Israel's actually tightened its gun control laws in recent years.

Well that just matches LaPierre's deceit about "violent games and movies" being to blame for mass shootings...given the fact that every other western nation has these same games...but not the guns...and not the number of mass shootings.

Monday, December 24, 2012

According to Del Ray, VA Patch,
Crapo was pulled over after an officer saw the senator run a red light.
Police spokesman Craig T. Fifer said that Crapo failed "several field
sobriety tests," reports CBS News. He was taken into custody "without incident."

According to a new paper released by Nature Geoscience,
the average annual temperature at the Byrd research center in central
West Antarctica has increased by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958,
which is not only twice as much as previous estimates but also three
times the average change worldwide, making the area "one of the
fastest-warming regions on earth."

Brownells, the company that calls itself the world's largest arms
supplier, reports it sold three-and-a-half years' worth of AR-15
ammunition magazine in just three days. The company apologized online
for delays in shipping new orders.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

House Republicans argue that voters handed their members a mandate as
well, granting the party control of the House for another two years and
with it the right to stick to their own views, even when they clash
strongly with the president’s.

From Rutherford B. Hayes to George W. Bush to the present GOP House, Republicans -- like seemingly everything -- have a strange definition of mandate...a 180 degree from reality one:

The NRA argues that it is evil people and not money hungry
corporations that are causing the bloodshed in American streets. While
they seem to have grown comfortable overlooking dead school children in
order to protect profits, one question they are not comfortable
answering is this: What influenced the son of NRA head David Keene, who
fired into the car of another motorist in 2002?

The New Yorker previously reported on how Keene’s served jail time for his misuse of a firearm.

In 2002, Keene’s son David Michael Keene was driving on the George
Washington Memorial Parkway when, in a road-rage incident, he fired a
handgun at another motorist. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for
“using, brandishing, and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence.”
I asked Keene if this private tragedy had left him uncertain about what
the N.R.A. had wrought. He said no: “You break the law, you pay the
price.”

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled today that employers can fire employees towards whom they have an "irresistible attraction," irrespective of the latter's workplace conduct.

The 7-0 decision, handed down by the all-male court, came about as a result of a lawsuit filed by married dental assistant Melissa Nelson, 32, against her boss of ten years, Dr. James Knight, D.D.S., alleging gender discrimination.

She claimed Knight fired her at the behest of his wife, who became jealous of their out-of-office relationship, which included the exchange of personal, yet innocuous texts.
Knight readily admits that he fired Nelson, whom he said was the best dental assistant he'd ever had, after consulting with his pastor, because he found her tight-fitting clothes distracting and he felt his marriage was in jeopardy.

According to court documents, Knight — described by his lawyer as "a very religious and moral individual" — once told Nelson the bulge in his pants was an indication that her clothes were too revealing. He also informed Nelson's husband that he had to fire Nelson out of fear that he might try and sleep with her.

Yet somehow that bonar and fear of his own moral weakness to want to try to seduce his female subordinate causing discharge was NOT motivated by gender.
Uh...yeah, right.

It should be noted that for a variety of reasons this was not a sex harassment claim, just a straight up gender claim, making the liability theories a bit more difficult (but the facts demanded it, the plaintiff claimed she did not feel pressured to sleep with the defendant nor did she believe there to be a hostile work environment).

But still, there's no doubt the Defendant's "boner law" is pretty clear evidence that gender played a role.

I fully expect defendant's in Iowa and elsewhere will now try to use their wives...and boners...as cat's paws in both hiring and firing decisions (to be fair the "spouse made me do it" has been used successfully before, just not so embarrassingly and often not successfully because it is, well so often clearly lame), I think that will ultimately not work so well...but it will be a pain in the ass for a while.

The National Rifle Association today held a press conference today at which it was determined that there would be no questions asked or answered, but the organization made it quite clear that they would be open to media questions next week, between Christmas and New Year's. Then they trotted out Wayne LaPierre, who had bats flying out of both ears.

Following our foot of "not news" yesterday there's nothing quite like getting up the next day to the parking spot you shoveled out yesterday to find needs to be shoveled out again...warm up your car a half hour early after a bad night's sleep because your "shoveling muscles" are out of shape. Oh and after a blizzard passes by it is ALWAYS super cold.

Then you take the dog out while the car's warming up and you have to convince her repeatedly that now would be a good time to relieve herself out of as many orifices as possible because you won't be back for several hours...THEN having accomplished her primary outdoor task because she's old and has snow caught in her paws she hobbles along until you carry her the last 20 yards to warmth and the biscuit well-earned...mostly by you.

Then you get in your warmed up, but still ice and snow laden car, and head off into the frozen landscape of the not very well cleared roads...in a very Lake Ladoga 1941-42ish drive through the hellscape with a bunch of other crazed actors that went through the same routine.

But at least I made it to work and can let my car defrost underneath my office building.

And every person living in the northeast and midwest knows what I'm writing about.

One of the less scintillating milestones of the 2012 election was marked by the General Services Administration, when Mitt Romney became the first candidate to take advantage of the Presidential Transition Act of 2010...

... The GSA says final costs are still being tabulated, but
the initial estimated cost for Romney’s pre-transition phase is around
$8.9 million.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) failed to muscle a controversial fiscal cliff fallback through the House Thursday night, suddenly pulling the bill after spending almost week on a plan that Democrats called a waste of time.

Which...of course...it was.

Somewhere the Spirit of Sam Rayburn is pointing and laughing his ass off.

Randolph Linn, 52, accepted a plea deal in which he pled guilty to all charges in connection to setting a fire in the prayer room at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo on Sept. 30. Under the deal, Linn is expected to serve 20 years in prison instead of 40...
“

And I was more sad when Judge [Jack] Zouhary asked him that, ‘Do you know any Muslims or do you know what Islam is?’” one mosque member who attended the hearing recalled to WNWO. “And he said, ‘No, I only know what I hear on Fox News and what I hear on radio.’”

Mass killers target Americans once every two weeks on average, in
attacks that range from robberies to horrific public shooting sprees
like the massacre Friday of 27 people in Newtown, Conn., a USA TODAY
examination found.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, said yesterday that it would continue to sell guns, including rifles like the one used at Newtown, where 26 people, most of them children, were killed on Dec. 14. By contrast, Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. (DKS) suspended sales of similar guns at its more than 500 stores.

Obviously, this has to be done because "Freedom" demands the Walton family have not just most, but all of the money.

Searches of five kinds of semi-automatic rifles on Wal- Mart’s website showed them to be out of stock at stores in five states, including Pennsylvania, Kansas and Alabama.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish
military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks
on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was
the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Provided desks, e-mail accounts
and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through
classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy
sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise
Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

Their compensation from the U.S. government for their efforts,
which often involved 18-hour workdays, seven days a week and dangerous
battlefield visits?

Tennessee has emerged this week as a center of the “the answer is more guns in schools” sentiment following the Newtown, Conn. elementary school shooting.
A member of the Republican-controlled legislature plans during its upcoming session to introduce a bill that would allow the state to pay for secretly armed teachers in classrooms so, the sponsor told TPM, potential shooters don’t know who has a gun and who doesn’t.

In a bit of word reversal it appears that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not only a client, but also the "President" of a prostitution ring.

French judges decided Wednesday not to drop pimping charges against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, his lawyers said. They quickly vowed to appeal.
...
Strauss-Kahn was hit in March with preliminary charges of "aggravated procurement in an organized gang" in an investigation into a hotel prostitution ring in nearby Lille that was said to involve prominent city figures and police.

The nation's largest gun owners' organization has issued its first remarks since last week's elementary school shooting, saying it is "heartbroken" by the "horrific and senseless murders" and prepared to offer "meaningful contributions" to prevent a repeat. It says it plans a press conference on Friday.

Oh, I'm sure that as a news dump on the last Friday before Christmas it will be real constructive.
Feel free to make your predictions below, but I imagine it will go something like this:

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) became the latest anti-gun control figure to embrace the notion that the best way to protect against future tragedies like Newtown, Connecticut, is to put more guns in public schools.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

...if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea

Yes, teaching children the "CANNON FODDER" strategy...good plan.
Gets 'em ready for the next war McArdle's folks dream up.
From the comments:

According to sources, David Clark, the executive producer in charge of Fox’s weekend coverage, gave producers instructions not to talk about gun-control policy on air. "This network is not going there,” Clark wrote one producer on Saturday night, according to a source with knowledge of the exchange.

An independent MP has called for a crackdown on firearms in Greece amid allegations that a growing number of politicians are carrying weapons.
Reports of pistol-carrying deputies entering parliament have added to the febrile mood in a 300-member chamber in which hardcore Marxists sit with fascists, eurocommunists, rightwing populists, conservatives, socialists and an array of independent dissidents.
The MP, Nikos Nikolopoulos, told the Guardian he was "deeply worried" by the dramatic rise in requests for weapons licenses by parliamentarians.
"I have real concerns that MPs are entering the house with weapons and because of that I asked how, in our temple of democracy, it was possible for deputies to carry guns?"

Who knew austerity would go so well with gunplay...other than everyone ever?

Daniel Inouye died yesterday after 50 years in the United States Senate. Never exactly the most loquacious politician he was well-regarded and powerful within the Senate. But no story will ever demonstrate why Inouye was a Democrat and a voice for Civil Rights more than this:

He grew up planning to become a doctor until 1942, when as a teenager
barely out of high school, he joined what would become a revered Army
regiment of Japanese Americans.

On an Italian battlefield two
years later, he destroyed three enemy machine gun nests even as bullets
tore through his stomach and legs. A grenade nearly ripped off his right
arm, and it was later amputated in an Army hospital.

Back in the
United States, the young lieutenant was wearing his empty right sleeve
pinned to his officer’s uniform when he stepped into a San Francisco
barbershop for a haircut. “We don’t serve Japs here,” the barber told
him.

Memories of such encounters remained vivid to Sen. Inouye,
who in his political career spoke eloquently in support of civil rights
and social welfare programs.

I'm sure it will now be no problem at all to discuss serious policy matters with all those teapartiers and libertarian cranks now that the "fever" has broken. Why just look at yesterday as the Electoral College members gathered in their State's respective capitols to vote:

... three Romney electors in Arizona tried one more time to convince everyone that Obama wasn't born in the United States:

Elector Don Ascoli said the fact Obama got more popular votes is irrelevant to the truth.
"The majority of the people had no dream that Bill Clinton did what he did until a young lady had a blue dress and proved he did," Ascoli said. "And he had to come out and apologize to the world because he lied to you and me."

The intense violence lasted about 10 minutes. Lanza fired at least three, 30-round magazines with deadly accuracy. Two of the people he shot survived. All of the victims were shot multiple times.
"I did seven (autopsies) myself with three to 11 wounds apiece," Chief State Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver III said Saturday. "Only two were shot at close range. I believe everybody was hit (by bullets) more than once."

It is like a nightmare fantasy of the most stereotypical kind of violence that gun-control advocates would veto because it is too awful to be believed.
Except it actually happened.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Obviously both are tragedies but the irony of these two events happening the same day and the comparison of the damage done is quite clear.

Twenty-two primary school children were wounded in a knife attack Friday in central China, authorities said.

The attack took place at
the entrance to the Chenpeng Village Primary School in Henan province,
according to the public information department of Guangshan county, the
area where the school is located. An adult was also wounded, it said.

Several of the children are in critical condition, the state-run website Chinanews.com said, citing local authorities.

This is horrible, of course, but one cannot help but not that while the carnage is great, it is also greatly less than the guy with a semi-automatic can do in a similar situation.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a potential 2016 Republican presidential
candidate, called for oral contraceptives to be made available over the
counter in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal published Thursday evening.

Sounds sort of rational right?

It also means you'll have to pay the full amount for birth control -- your insurance no longer has to provide it to you.

Apparently -- and not surprisingly -- Republican Crazy Person and gerrymandered into irreality -- Virginia Foxx has a very bizarre fetish.

ITK last week brought you one tipster’s claims of Foxx laying the verbal smackdown on a female staffer for taking a ride on a members-only elevator. The congresswoman’s office said the story — which involved Foxx questioning the staffer’s literacy vis-à-vis the “members-only” sign — was an “exaggeration” by “disrespectful junior staffers” who will go to great lengths “just to read about themselves in the paper.”
Now more elevator horror stories are coming in.

I just pray we don't find out there's an Aerosmith song in there somewhere.

The Tea Party is about purity, and DeMint doesn't want to sully himself with the congress's probably-inevitable decision to raise taxes to avoid this budget collapse. So his highly-symbolic resignation is his wing of the party's Picking-Up-The-Ball-And-Going-Home moment. The message of the DeMint move is simple: We tried to work within the system, but the system turned out to be dirty, so we are leaving the system.

That, of course, would be a-w-e-s-o-m-e. Like Kos, I also think it will not happen.
Delusional people don't suddenly because reasonable like any good cult they just believe more than ever.
Maybe, just maybe, Jim DeMint is not crazy -- but rather just an opportunist who sees a chance of a seven-figure salary where he doesn't have to suck up to rich douchebags anymore -- because now he'll be the rich douchebag being sucked up to.
The rest of Teabaggers will remain crazy, or at least vote that way until their slot opens -- to be replaced by the next aspirant.
Unless there's a Red Adair for puke funnels, they'll still be more of them flowing out for a while.
[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Fifty-nine percent of Republicans want GOP leaders in the House and
Senate to compromise to reach a deal to avert the fiscal cliff,
according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday. In April, just 38 percent backed such a compromise.

It is the 1,000th of 1 percent that pay the bills for them -- and the Koch Brothers demand the rest of you .... suffer.

The Defeated Michigan Republicans truly want to fulfill all their fantasies...the ones that got them kicked out of office in their dying days (which is a rather morbid notion considering how many lives will end because of them).

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) scolded Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) in remarks to the press Wednesday for refusing to extend middle income tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year. Her message? Being speaker is hard, but figure it out for the good of the country.
“It’s tough. But you have to do it,” she told reporters in the Capitol on Wednesday. “Figure it out.”

I'm sure that will spur him to do nothing more than tear up as usual. After all his latest "clever plan" was certainly neither of those terms.
A couple generations from now the Orange Man is determined to be a well-remembered as Denny Hastert is right now.
I know, who?
[cross-posted at Firedoglake]
(pic via mikenitro94 at flickr.com)

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Arrested Development showrunner Mitch Hurwitz filmed too much for the show's Netflix revival, so now we probably have to deal with the crappy reality of twelve to fifteen new episodes rather than a nice clean ten.

Do something in 140 characters of less...you'd think your pipeline to the Almighty would give you better material, at least a killer "knock-knock joke"...something about not seeing lamb's blood on the door frame or something.

I have one question, why does your doodled Coat of Arms looks like a censored penis drawing (with a French Tickler no less) and how has Gawker missed that? Is it considered a Miracle -- or just an insight into an underlying condition?

"When you start looking at our older students, we see less improvement over time," said Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which coordinated the U.S. portion of the international exam.

Even where U.S. student scores have improved, many other nations have improved much faster, leaving American students far behind many of their peers — especially in Asia and Europe.

With an eye toward global
competitiveness, U.S. education officials are sounding the alarm over
what they describe as a recurring theme when American students are put
to the test. Lamenting what he described as "sober cautionary notes," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said it was unacceptable that eighth-grade achievement in math and science are stagnant, with U.S. students far less likely than many Asian counterparts to reach advanced levels in science.

Maybe if our teachers were a bit better paid and could teach things like you know evolutionary science as y'know a science and all.

And hey, maybe if we let schools in poor areas have more money that might help too.

— Some U.S. states that were
measured separately were clear standouts, performing on par with or
better than some top-performing Asian countries. Eighth-graders in
Massachusetts and Minnesota score far better in math and science than
the U.S. average. But in California and Alabama, eighth-graders fell
short of the national average.

— Racial and class disparities
are all too real. In eighth grade, Americans in the schools with the
highest poverty — those with 75 percent or more of students on free or
reduced-price lunch — performed below both the U.S. average and the
lower international average. Students at schools with fewer poor kids
performed better. In fourth-grade reading, all ethnic groups
outperformed the international average, but white and Asian students did
better than their black and Hispanic classmates.

As Florida's Republican governor and his co-horts dream of new ways to keep minorities from voting, the State's history on the subject of racial injustice has provided a morbid reminder:

Anthropologists have found evidence of 98 deaths and more graves than previously identified at a now-closed state reform school in the Panhandle, according to a report released Monday.
An interim report released by the University of South Florida in Tampa says the researchers found at least 50 gravesites at the former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, about 60 miles west of Tallahassee.

It's the kind of nightmare you'd think would be the lead news throughout the country, but so far not all that much. Ritualistic beating, isolation, and clearly worse abuse of young black kids over a period of more than a half century form World War One into the early 1970s.

The anthropologists, led by Associate Professor Erin Kimmerle, used historical documents to verify the deaths of two adult staff members and 96 children — ranging in age from 6 to 18 — from 1914 through 1973.
“The cause and manner of death for the majority of cases are unknown,” the researchers wrote. In those cases where causes could be documented the most common were infectious disease, fires, physical trauma and drowning.
Other mortality patterns showed trends of deaths occurring after escapes and within three months of arriving at the school.

The institution was a reformatory for black children, almost all of them sent there on minor offenses -- and given the nature of Jim Crow justice, for which this school is the eternal symbol, how many of those offenses were these kids even guilty of?

You know what might have prevented something like this in the past? Allowing African-Americans to vote in large numbers.

And Rick Scott and the Republicans want to make sure that isn't allowed to get out of hand.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student
why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and
murder.

"I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's effective,"
Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to
be immoral.

...

Some in the audience who had come to hear Scalia speak about his book
applauded but more of those who attended the lecture clapped at
freshman Duncan Hosie's question.

"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which
is called the `reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San
Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have
moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can
we have it against other things?"

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

Yes, and here's the thing you'd think a sentient human being would understand -- when YOU make arguments claimed to be reductio ad absurdum (look at all those law school loans paying off!) YOU are the one who gets to pick the comparison, no one else. So if it is specious and offensive it is also on YOU.

And equating being gay to murder...that's offensive...and YOU are responsible for it.

As someone who had a family member come to my little ol' State from halfway across the world to marry the love of their life in a ceremony that would have been illegal a couple years before, these pictures from Seattle beg the question, how big an asshole do you have to be to deny the right of same sex couples to marry now?

Monday, December 10, 2012

The three non-wisemen ladies and gentlemen -- Bill O'Reilly, Bernard McGuirk (the other half, and key contributor to Imus "Nappy Headed Ho's" fiasco, and Greg "Dennis Miller with less talent" Gutfield discuss who really is at war on Christmas:

MCGUIRK: The war on Christmas is very, very real, and if
you ask me, in addition to some grouchy misanthropic heathen atheists it
has to do — at the root of it — with two things — abortion and the gay rights agenda, because Christianity is against those things. It’s subtle but that’s why it’s so pronounced in recent years.

O’REILLY: Hundred percent agree. I absolutely agree
100 percent that the diminishment of Christianity is the target and
Christmas is the vehicle because the secularists know the opposition to
their agenda (legalized drugs is in that as well) comes primarily from
the Judeo-Christian traditionalist people.

Really hitting the Myrrh this year boys.

Yeah...hard to believe their becoming less relevant every day isn't it?

According to FEC data released December 6, Morris' Super PAC for America paid conservative news outlet Newsmax Media roughly $1.7 million
for "fundraising" in October and November. A significant portion of
the super PAC's money likely went to renting Morris' own email list,
which is operated by Newsmax Media.

A Media Matters review found that in the month before the
election, Morris sent at least 21 emails to his mailing list featuring
fundraising pitches that were "paid for by Super PAC for America." Super
PAC also "paid for" at least 25 emails to Newsmax.com's main email list
during the same period.

How much money went in Morris' pockets?

A lot obviously.

High value considering Morris would sell what he has of a soul for much much less.

It is truly amazing that with the groundwork laid down the push for marriage-equality began in earnest less than a decade ago -- and here we are after Califonia's false start and Iowa's Supreme Court ruling within three years the whole edifice of resistance is crumbling fast.

Washington Post columnist George Will, who appeared alongside Matalin, also dismissed the potency of the issue for Republicans. “There is something like an emerging consensus,” he said. “Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It’s old people.”

Within thirty years of the passage of Title VII and the Voting Rights Act, there were Republicans talking as if they, and they alone, passed those bills -- while ignoring the Dixiecrats had long-since found a home in the GOP.
I imagine within a couple years, the GOP will try to play the same game with same-sex marriage.
Besides, they've already found their new target. Single parents:

Mary Matalin: 30 years from now, real people understand the consequences of so many babies being born out of wedlock to the economy and to the morality of the country.

Sunday, December 09, 2012

Among the 1,000 individuals polled nationwide throughout September and October, just 9 percent approved of Congress’ current job performance. The margin of error for the public opinion survey conducted by YouGov/Polimetrix was 3.5 percent. That means Congress’ approval rating could be as high as 12.5 percent or as low as 5.5 percent.

Well at least the GOP got re-districting to be as fucked up as they are.

Saturday, December 08, 2012

Birmingham, Alabama (PRWEB) December 04, 2012 – The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence. Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.

I don't know about this study (sounds dubious), but at least it is a study, as opposed to a paranoid delusion, which in and of itself sounds at least 20 IQ points higher.

One week after the 2012 election, Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters told Bill O'Reilly that Obama voters were "zombies" who supported the president "as long as there was Obamacare, gay marriage and abortion on demand."
Per the FEC filing above, Watters, who resides in Long Island, N.Y., contributed $500 to Obama Victory Fund 2012 in late September. You'll note "News Corp.," which owns Fox News, is listed under "name of employer."

The Republicans’ anti-tax Tea Party wing, which failed in its goal to defeat President Barack Obama and the Senate Democratic majority, is rising to leadership positions in policy and activist groups that have guided the party’s direction for years.
South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who helped insurgent candidates oust incumbent Republicans in primaries, announced yesterday that he will lead the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, a group that has served as an incubator for the party’s policy and legislative ideas for decades.

If the Party was more pro-choice y'know these incubators wouldn't be such a problem.

The only thing funnier than Dick Morris always being wrong about predictions, is his blatantly wrong explanations of why he was so wrong.

We lost because whites stayed home! Particularly among the elderly,
the voter turnout was disappointing with seniors casting only 16% of the
vote, much less than had been anticipated. (Seniors were the only age
group that Obama lost by a significant margin — 15 points).

Why didn’t whites vote and why didn’t we all spot it sooner?

Impact of Sandy.

Yeah, Dick, if only the whites in New York and New Jersey had turned out (oh, they did?) Romney would have won there.

I do think this may be one of the more off-putting statements I have read of late that did not involve a FoxNews pundit or Jerry Sandusky. Ladies and gentlemen, mother and daughter porn team specializing in 3-ways...what's so special about it daughter?

"I enjoy the sex and I enjoy being with my mom,"says Monica, who dropped out school in ninth grade and got her mom started in the porn biz before following suit.

As long as we take the dogs with us, the rest of the planets residents will probably be quite pleased.

A strong
earthquake struck Friday off the coast of northeastern Japan in the same
region that was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami last year.
Tokyo high-rises swayed for several minutes, one city reported a small
tsunami and at least two people were reported injured.

From holding 80th place in the 176 countries on Transparency International's corruption perceptions index in 2011, Greece's global ranking, this year, fell to 94, the global watchdog announced on Wednesday. In terms of perceived levels of public corruption, Greece was on a par with Moldova and Mongolia. In the 27-strong EU, there was no other state that fared worse.

In a country not only mired in a fifth straight year of recession but enduring a third year of unprecedented austerity, where one in three now lives below the poverty line and a quarter of the population is unemployed, corruption is a means to an end.
It is, say analysts, the flipside of austerity in an economy in freefall. "To survive in such a hostile situation, you have to bend the rules," said political commentator Giorgios Kyrtsos. "There is no other way when things are so hard – you are forced to resort to corruption to deal with the state mechanism."

Austerity has created a nation no longer on the road to ruin, but taking up residence there.
The only solution forced upon the pople, of course, as Atrios has repeatedly stated, is more austerity.
[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

Thursday, December 06, 2012

Jim DeMint one of the Senate's most vociferously inclined members of Alternative Earth, is leaving the August body of skull-fuckery for the Heritage Foundation, America's premier think-tank for those who might as well be ocularly violated.

The word “lunatic” will be stricken from federal law under legislation that passed the House on Wednesday and is headed to President Obama for his signature...
The Congressional action is the latest effort to remove language from federal law that has become outdated or is considered demeaning. Two years ago Congress took out references to “mental retardation.”
“The term ‘lunatic’ holds a place in antiquity and should no longer have a prominent place in our U.S. code,” said Representative Robert C. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, shortly before the 398-to-1 vote in the House. The word, derived from the Latin word from moon, arises from ancient beliefs that people could become “moonstruck” by lunar movements.
...
The lone “no” vote was cast by Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas